


Paper Memories

by pyrrhical (anoyo)



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/M, Post-307, Spoilers for 307, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-04
Updated: 2017-12-04
Packaged: 2019-02-10 14:02:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12913410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/pyrrhical
Summary: Even Kara’s memories fall apart when she looks at them too long.





	Paper Memories

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for a [Lands of Magic](https://lands_of_magic.dreamwidth.org) challenge. This is not a happy fic?

Before, the memories had hurt, but they had also been a comfort. It had been real: a thing that had really happened. He might be gone, but he had been there, and that was something.

Now, there was only the hurt. It was as though someone had taken Kara’s memories and systematically destroyed them. They were real, but the people contained within them no longer existed. Kara wasn’t the girl she had been, before Mon-El had disappeared. The girl Alex had been clinging to; the girl Kara had been pushing so hard to send away. Maybe, if things had been different, that girl, or some form of her, might have come back.

But they weren’t different, and that girl was gone. In her place stood Supergirl, a fiercely kind and benevolently powerful woman, similar, but not the same, to Kara Danvers. That Kara Danvers had disappeared alongside Mon-El, but hadn’t returned with him.

Neither, really, had Mon-El himself. It was almost ironic. Two years in a row, Mon-El had awoken in the DEO’s infirmary, his appearance a mystery. Both times, Kara had sat by his bedside and hoped. Both times, Kara had been disappointed.

And she was disappointed. It wasn’t fair, but human feelings rarely were. Kara had spent months hoping, crying, and forcefully pulling herself back together, and then Mon-El had appeared, like the answer to everything she’d wanted. In retrospect, she should have been a little more specific, in her hoping.

This Mon-El, seven years older and married, was as much a stranger to Kara as the Mon-El who had come straight from the destruction of Daxam. Not even a year of his life had been spent with Kara, in her time. It was disappointing, to have lost all that time. 

It was disappointing, not to have gotten exactly what she wanted. This Mon-El, so different from the one she had known, but at the same time, so much more real for the time that had passed.

If Kara was no longer the girl she had been, and Mon-El had barely been the man she had known at all, then what did that make her memories? Fairy tales? The fictional romance of two people who didn’t exist?

Ultimately, Kara knew it didn’t matter. She could physically travel backward or forward in time all the universe would allow, but life was linear in a way that time didn’t have to be. She couldn’t reverse back into the girl she had been before any more than she could keep hoping that she got the Mon-El of the past back, somehow. She was strong, and she was brave, and she would keep on living, because it was either that or give up.

Maybe Kara might have been willing to give up, but Supergirl wasn’t. Good thing, then, that she wasn’t Kara Danvers anymore.


End file.
